Is This A Good Time to Talk About Civility?

P.M. Forni, the early Italian Literature professor who asked all of us to choose civility, died earlier this month at his Maryland home.

As a faculty member at Johns Hopkins University, Forni help found The Civility Project whose aim was to examine the importance of civility in society, and promote its practice on college campuses and communities around the country.

As reported by The New York Times (Dec. 11), “The first book is how not to be rude,” Virginia Forni explained in a telephone interview, “and the second book is what to do when other people are rude to you.”

Forni’s original 25 rules may appear simple, but can be challenging to practice for some:

“Lack of civility, [Forni] argued, is also more than a matter of semantics.

“ ‘Acts of violence are often the result of an exchange of acts of rudeness that spiral out of control,’ he told The Christian Science Monitor in 2007. ‘Disrespect can lead to bloodshed. By keeping the levels of incivility down we keep the levels of violence down.’ ”

“ ‘One day, while lecturing on the Divine Comedy, I looked at my students and realized that I wanted them to be kind human beings more than I wanted them to know about Dante,’ he wrote. ‘I told them that if they knew everything about Dante and then they went out and treated an elderly lady on the bus unkindly, I’d feel that I had failed as a teacher.’ ”

Thus, was born The Civility Project. Along with U.C.L.A. Professor Giulia Sissa, the two “organized an ambitious conference called ‘Reassessing Civility: Forms and Values at the End of the Century.’ ”